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Peter Schiff, Carl Icahn &amp; Over Regulation

Produce Nothing, Profit Nothing

Peter Schiff, Carl Icahn & Over Regulation

One thing Icahn is adamant about is the US economy’s move from manufacturing to the service industry being a wrong turn.In a society like ours, manufacturing is important. Sooner or later, you can’t just keep tweeting to one another. We say we’re a service economy. Oh, that’s great…What does that mean? That we text more to each other? Sooner or later, everybody is going to just sit there and text to one another. Isn’t that wonderful? So why should anybody work? We can just sit there and text to each other and watch TV. This is happening as we speak…Eventually our currency is going to go to hell and we’re going to lose our hegemony.”

Perhaps it's a bit more complex. The added value of manufacturing will probably significantly decrease in the coming era of robot workforce. That will help the most developed economies to better fend off the challenge of less developed ones since the competitive advantage of those will be diminished.
Yet a greater risk for such 'postindustrial' societies will be a continued or even increasing trade deficit combined with a permanent financial deficit. A traditional industrial society can by far better grow out of such a deteriorating situation.
This is not contradictory with my previous statement since the lowering of the competitive advantage of others and even the adjunct increase of industrial productivity doesn't necessarily yield an increase of wealth per capita in the 'postindustrial' economy cause of the still diminishing share of industrial production vs services.

3D printing may be the game changer once again, like Moore's Law in computing. George Gilder makes some of the points that you bring up @NomidasSee also the Goldmoney Townhall

3D may permit President Trump to really "do something about China" without too much fuss from Tim Cook. Just my wild speculation Like fracking gave President Obama leeway to throw Hosni Mubarak under the bus at Al Azhar University in Cairo.

@nigelmarkdias
3 D printing will be one of the game changer with massive impact in the material sciences. But I have my doubts how prudent the decisions of a President Trump will be in this or any respect.
Yet I pray they won't be so unresponsible as the Cairo speech of Obama had been the outcoming of which still has destructive consequences for the entire Middle East!
The good thing of technologies like 3 D printing or robotics is that they much more benefit developed economies than developing ones like China even though China already uses 3D printing more extensively than the US for now. But developing economies cannot substitute industrial workforce as efficiently as developed ones and transfer it into services.

What. does this mean for Gold?
Even though in the longer term such a substitution of workforce and probably raw materials too, will have rather deflationary consequences it will go hand in hand with further increased asset inflation - and since Gold is the paragon of an asset that justifies Great Expectations!

"Yet I pray they won't be so unresponsible as the Cairo speech of Obama had been the outcoming of which still has destructive consequences for the entire Middle East!"@NomidasLet's see how President Trump makes the Middle East more interesting than President Obama.

Einstein once said that industrial advances would eventually allow workers to reduce their workweek to 30 hours and that we'd all become really well educated because we would have more time to read and expand our horizons. Apparently he thought 1) we would all still get paid our same salaries for not working as much and 2) that nothing like television would come along and turn our brains into mush.